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Saturday, April 21, 2012

Narcissists vs. Sociopaths (part 3)

(cont.)

I'm Low Empathy. Am I a Sociopath or a Narcissist?If you know you are low empathy, and you just don't care about others finding out, you are a sociopath.If you do bad things, but think your empathy is just fine, but you've got a nagging fear that maybe there is something wrong with your empathy, but you definitely don't want others to find out - you are a narcissist.If you don't feel any shame when you get caught, you are a sociopath.If you feel shame when getting caught, you are a narcissist.If you do bad things because you are on a crusade, you are a narcissist, or a malignant narcissist. Decide between the two alternatives based on how cruel and impulsive you are.If do bad things because it is good for you, and don't mind if others know it (except when it gets in the way of you winning) you are a sociopath.

108 comments:

Who the fuck wrote this shit. I'm not a crusader or anything leave me the fuck alone with this shit already sick to death of this crap I'm done here my work is done you're a complete waste of time you obsessed mother fuckers been reading this blog for 18 years the good luck number btw for "you people" go ahead and out yourselves for the pigs you are I could go on f. x: get a life get a dog get a fish go the dentist again have all your teeth pulled don't overlook your impacted wisdoms the good lord knows they caused enough prefrontal brain damage your grandiosity is at an all time high

Why would you care what some blogger wrote. If you don't think that it is true, just ignore it. Don't take it so seriously. While some readers here were enterntained by your nonsece i think that you are stupid.But you really are a narcissist, you care so much...Good luck on your crusade of changing our view of you!

Mee I believe I am a narcissist. It hurts more than anything, the shame I have of my self. My mother was so vicious to me, I still hear her voice in my ear. Not only that, she was an extention of me when I was a kid..I was ashamed of her the way some people below talk about their mothers being ashamed of them.

I did not have kids. If I had had one by accident or something, no amt of therapy in the world would have caused them not to see some of her in me.

I may care what people think but I think that's good. Atleast I didn't cause any innocent children pain.

I don't care what YOU think of me, idiot. I care what *I* think of me.

Well, after the entertainment provided by Anon 12:46 above, time to post something sensible.

I take it these posts are just someone theorising about narc Vs socio, or are they referencing from "fact"? The more I think about it the more it seems the author is describing different types of psycho/sociopaths due to the extreme ways in which a narc is being described.

Maybe this is all just highlighting the issues with applying psychiatric labels and bracketing symptoms under defined disorders.

"Maybe this is all just highlighting the issues with applying psychiatric labels and bracketing symptoms under defined disorders."

Agreed. If I were to go by these three posts trying to define the two.. well my result would be that I have no fucking which I am. I think the last post rendered me a malignant narc, this one, definitely a sociopath..

The Mal Narc has terrible, terrible shame for every flaw. Every human need, every human want is accompanied by shame. This brought my mother to the point where she could not express any emotion because it had to be perfect. She could not think any thought that was not in line with these standards of perfection, too. If she did, she beat herself up, unmercifully. Hence, she was a no-man. She had no sense of being definite.She was a zelig as Woody Allen portrayed in his movie. She held her children to the same standard. They had to be totally perfect.If not, they had the same black mark. Then, they became part of the garbage heap. Once you were on the garbage heap, you were all bad. She could take you off the garbage heap if you got enough accolades from outside. However, then you would go back on at any small grievance. There was the all good phase where you were idealized and the all bad phase when you were scorned.

However, this shame kept her in line from doing things a sociopath may do. For that, I am very grateful.

This brought my mother to the point where she could not express any emotion because it had to be perfect. She could not think any thought that was not in line with these standards of perfection, too. If she did, she beat herself up, unmercifully. Hence, she was a no-man. She had no sense of being definite.

you capture it well, Monica. that's how some of my family is - every thought and feeling has to pass first through "the filter" before it is accepted and can be experienced - it used to drive me crazy!

the worst part is when everything starts to pass and "perfection" is reached, the filter changes and you have to start again. what drives the change is feelings. as it was explained to me... it just no longer feels right.

i rejected that early on. it seemed wrong. it influenced me no doubt, but i never completely internalized it. i would jump on the garbage heap on my own, until they eventually accepted it. the price was not quite being one of them. the benefit was not being held to the same standards... being their special snowflake so to speak.

on a slightly different note.. i was thinking this week how the presence of personality disorders depends on others (on society), and it's theoretically possible to have a different disorder depending on your social circle. i mean there is no such thing as a disorder in the absolute sense. a psychopath alone on a planet would not be any more a psychopath than an empath. in my case, while i am an empath in general, i was the "sociopath" in my family.

i don't think you can always cure or change someone without taking into consideration the environment around them and modifying it as well. otherwise, that's a bit like expecting an alcoholic to keep drinking and at the same time trying to cure the alcoholism.

Doing something perfectly for me is just like having a fetish. It's just the challenge. It's the personal wow factor and has nothing to do with the way others see me. Most often they just think I'm a fantastic employee. And hey, that's a nice perk.

PErfectionism needs to be compartmentalized. It's really only shitty for the perfectionist if/when it prevents them from moving forward. This is my problem. By the time I realize I've done this and I have perfected messing things up so they aren't perfect, my brain is fucking tired. And then apathy (?) kicks in? I've always thought laziness + perfectionism was what I had.

I'm not lazy in the least bit. What I have is like a combination of fear of success and failure, and then Idk. Is it apathy, boredom, ambivalence?

Because by the time I figure out it's fear of successs and I go and imagine all I would feel being "successful" I just want to make a sandwich and call it a night. Then tomorrow it's "oh well tmrw is a another day" I never get shit done.

This is what my old diaries look like, and this is the source of most of my circumstantial depression.

I hate platitudes. I want to smash someone in the face when they give me them. So, to answer your question, I will tell you a true story. My mother went away for the summer due to an illness. My brother and I stayed at my grandmothers. My brother was 14 months old. When my mother picked him up, he turned away from her out of anger for being left. She rejected him for the rest of his life because she thought HE rejected her. To add to that, she defends the story, to this day. I have tried to show her how crazy that was. She still doesn't see it. Are there words to explain that?

growing up, i was always treated as if i was years older. the expectations were high. but i learned to work around them.... i think when you're the odd one or different one in the family, there is less to lose and being a rebel actually can be easier. there is more motivation to define yourself outside of the family.

funny how perfectionism accompanies procrastination. you would think it would be the opposite. the narcissists in my family are high achieving perfectionists. they're driven more by image, rather than any passion. what stalls them is that they can never get to that perfect place that exists only in their minds. and they don't want to be associated with anything less.

Well, best answer i could think of would be, that she thought, she didn't deserve that reaction, that he should understand that she came back for you after being ill and that this way she did a very big job, so you should worship her or sth like that.

And i thought that only my mother is weird... Mine is a manipulative, abusive, psychopath-ish one. Everything always has to be the way she wants or there will be trouble. She often pretends to be the victim in a situation where she does all the pressure and so on. Maybe that's how all parents act?Hope you will find sth here, i don't want to get into details, though.

Zoe--my theory is the oldest gets the worst and the severest dose. The oldest seems least likely to get away.However, there are always mitigating factors. For you, being the different one would be a mitigating factor. You made it clear that you would not conform. That would be a saving grace factor. I had a saving grace factor from the love of my grandmother.

Monica, your theory doesn't hold true in my case. I have a sister who's 4 years older and a nasty mal narc bitch grandmother. My sister is the most revolting piece of mal narc white trash you could ever hope never to meet. My grandmother treated this bitch like gold, but pinned all her expectations, aspirations and punishments onto me. I was even punished, severely, for everything my sister did wrong. I was the one who has to be perfect, she was already considered perfect by my grandmother. My parents are so weak they never stood up to my grandmother (to this day), so she was allowed to run riot. My mother is the classic martyr, and my family tried desperately to break me down with abuse to create a new slave. Hell, I even copped endless crap about not being legally able to drive them around (at 12yo) or that I was not married by 16.They failed miserably though, as I just became more ruthless, manipulative and determined to get away from them. Throwing myself onto the 'garbage pile' and laughing when they tried their passive aggressive bullshit on me. They couln't touch me any more, so that's all they had left. It's quite fun watching them try to make me feel guilt or shame. It seems that seeing me happy with my life now is the worst torture for them. That and the knowledge their free ride ends with my mother.You can't change these mal narc bitches, all you can do is walk away and protect your own family. They deserve better, don't you think?

After reading this blog for some time I have realised that my mother is a narcissist. Certainly not a mal narc, but enough of one that I severed all contact with her years ago. Now I am beginning to understand why I despise her so.

Green Eyes Yes, the Mal narc polarizes the children into the All Good and the All Bad one. Birth order may be a factor or not. Sometime, the All Bad one can remind them of the father whom the mother hates or something like this. I am sorry for what you went through!

Zoe--my theory is the oldest gets the worst and the severest dose. The oldest seems least likely to get away.However, there are always mitigating factors. For you, being the different one would be a mitigating factor. You made it clear that you would not conform. That would be a saving grace factor. I had a saving grace factor from the love of my grandmother.

the oldest one really does get the worst. i was pathologically independent and smarter than the narcs in the family which saved me. also, they weren't all bad - this helped in some ways and made it confusing in others.

i don't normally like to go into specifics, but here is one example i will share. one family member at Christmas slammed the door in the face of a guy whose car broke down and who rang the bell to ask if he could use the phone - all because he interrupted the dinner preparations! i arrived after the fact and couldn't believe it when i heard what happened... i mean it was Christmas!!! this same family member quit a senior role because of pressure to make an unethical decision that could potentially have led to serious consequences including impacting the health of others - but the risk was low. so there was a strong sense of ethics, but we were a little low on the empathy.

apparently i was also really close to my grandmother - but have only very distant and vague memories of her.

It seems that seeing me happy with my life now is the worst torture for them. That and the knowledge their free ride ends with my mother.

this is such a great observation. seeing this is key to getting what's going on. i noticed it with some of my family, and with certain people i used to work with. misery makes them happy, and happiness makes them miserable. it's as if they are wired backwards, and need to surround themselves with misery to feel good - which almost always includes conjuring it up by way of gossip.

I ask because my father was a sociopath with narcissistic traits, and although my mother was never officially diagnosed, my sister and I suspect that she may have been suffering from BPD. She, too, had an immense fear of rejection and engaged in the "splitting" behaviours that your mother seems to exhibit - she'd idolise her kids one day, and then she'd demonize us the next. But because my father was the greater threat, she never really troubled me (she did trouble my sister, though, who was diagnosed with BPD at the age of sixteen).

Green Eyes - my mother considered naming me my father's daughter to be the worst possible insult imaginable, too. But it didn't bother me, to be honest. My father may've been diagnosed as "criminally insane," but some of the personality traits I've inherited from him have come in usual in my life.

Getting into details...Once i asked my mother if i can do sth, she said that she had other plans with me, however she agreed. Later she built up a conflict between us and said that i am talking rude, etc. and as a punishment i have to do what she wanted. Well she didn't said it so clear, but that was the point. Now i am starting to think that she is a narc, because she never applied physical harm on me, well there were a few attemts, but everything turned out without injuries.Also as a potential sociopath i make her angry easily, because i don't show feelings and she feels that she isn't appreciated enough, she probably has some kind of worth complex. Sometimes i think that i should fake emotions, but i don't care enough about it to try and it seems as a hard task for me, i'd rather be hated, but remain who i am.

It is simple really, read between the lines. The author highlights the potential of a narc and lowballs the potential of a sociopath. He/she/it is probably a narc on a crusade to prove that narcs are as good as sociopaths. While the truth is that he can never achieve the greatness of a sociopath. Narcs will always remain the lowest in the pecking order of the group.

I have to confess (using an alias, though. HA!) that reading this blog has made me comfortable with who I am. I don't believe that I'm either a narc or a sociopath, but the traits I seem to have inherited from my father (who was a sociopath) don't seem so bad now. I mean, they never really bothered me - I was just concerned that they'd manifest like his did, and that they'd destroy my life the way they destroyed his life. I thought I'd end up like him: my mind rotted out by alcohol, living in a state house in a squalid, impoverished town with nothing else to do but manipulate the only people retarded enough to believe my lies.

same reasons a socio, but even more so cause of the compassionate work. Police need to tell homeless to move it off public places and get unfortunate street punks comfortable enough to rat out the ringleaders. It requires factual roboticism with compassion. Also the dissociation could help if in an emergency. Temper is handy for intimidation I guess, too.

The primary source of a sociopath's infamous rage is frustration, of a sort so alien and so extreme that almost no one else can understand what it means. Once they start getting taken seriously, that frustration, and the wild rage it provokes, will lessen, and since it is a primary source of the constant distrust that makes regular therapy fail sociopaths, the defusing of that rage and its maddening causes will be a huge step in the right direction.

In her book, Martha Stout expresses the hope that people in general will stop excluding groups of other people as less than human -- ethnic, racial, the disabled, and even the mentally ill -- except for one group among the latter. It's apparently perfectly okay to dismiss one group alone of people as less than human, and she does: the sociopaths. And many other people do, too.

And sociopaths know that. And people whose messed-up brain circuitry makes it almost impossible for them to trust others certainly aren't ever going to try again after getting hit with THAT.

Sociopaths don't always behave as though they're invulnerable. Some have said, "You don't know this, but it hurts to be me." People sneeringly say to this, "Another of your miserable lies!" But it is in fact a miserable truth.

Being angry at them is understandable, but why do people insist on justifying their anger by dehumanizing the object of their rage? Sociopaths may seem like aliens, but they aren't. Perhaps what really galls the others is that when they look at sociopaths, in certain tiny ways they see aspects of themselves, for everyone has some antisocial thoughts.

Also, sociopaths hurt a lot of people. What seems to hurt most is the idea that the sociopath is breezing happily through life having a blast while a trail of wounded victims struggle to put their shattered lives back together.

No sociopath breezes through life. They just know how to make it look like they do. It's part of the sick game they play because they can't do much of anything else, as they are.

If sociopathy is treated instead of ignored and shunned, this won't have to happen.

Those who would have been hurt by sociopaths might not be able to fully appreciate that they escaped harm because neuroscience finally found a way to treat these people who would otherwise have hurt them, but the thing that makes the most difference is that, in the final analysis, they wouldn't have to know.

Just as science understands that epilepsy is not demonic possession, that people with dissociative conditions are not harboring ghosts or devils in their bodies, and that depression is not a "deadly sin," it would and will be able to prove that sociopathy happens for a reason and that it can be dealt with. Sociopaths do very bad things. But branding them all "pure evil" isn't going to help anyone. It's just more hate.

I have commented elsewhere that the human brain is the greatest new frontier in many ways. (Although I certainly have no lack of interest in space.) Sociopaths, along with other "hopeless cases" like people with Alzheimer's disease, Down's syndrome, Asperger's, ADD, ADHD, autism, and the schizophrenias, along with more common disorders such as depression and addiction, and so on, are a mystery, but scientists have a way of hammering away at mysteries until they unravel them, and, be assured, they are well on their way to the core of this one.

i don't think sociopaths need "help" at all. encouragment for using their gift in the right direction is helpful, but such is the case with anyone. separating them, declaring that they are bad only gives them a reason to be bad.

i think personality disorders, sociopathy being the most interesting of the lot, are going to be a big talking point in the near future. all of us are already ahead of the crowd and your ideas are truly what i feel to be the proper response to the issue.

Absolutely brilliant. I've only known a few sociopaths, but get right underneath the rage, and you'll find an arrested emotional development usually caused by an extremely traumatic experience in childhood, coupled with the contempt one encounters when one spends his or her entire lifetime witnessing the absolute worst in humanity. If only more people would entertain your compassion.

Featured comment

Of course, my default is still to intuitively analyze every outcome and situation and achieve the best result, but it's more interesting to let people remain a variable and go in their own direction, rather than nudging them in the direction I prefer. Interacting with people WITHOUT trying to control them is a new paradigm for me.